One of the most important space achievements made by humans was “New Horizons”. New Horizons is an inter-planetary space probe that was launched as a part of NASA's new frontiers program. It was supposed to be a flyby mission to Jupiter and Pluto but it proved out to be having a much greater goal as it went past our imagination into the deepest of the space crossing and dodging millions of asteroids and space dust.
It is the fifth space probe in human
history to achieve the velocity to escape the solar system. It was engineered
by John's Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and the South West Research University with a team led by S.Alan Stern.
It was launched on January 19, 2006,
from Cap Canaveral Air Force Station. It was launched directly into the earth-and-solar
escape trajectory with a speed of about 16.25 km/s. It became the fastest
man-made object ever and on July 14, 2015, it became the first spacecraft to
explore the dwarf planet “Pluto” from just 12,500 km away from its surface and
by 2016 it gained a speed of more than 84,000 km/h.
New Horizons is powered by
radio-isotope thermo-electric generator (RTG), which transforms
the heat from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium dioxide into
electricity.
Now, one of the hardest and also the
most dangerous phase of the mission was to face the Kuiper belt. Kuiper belt is
a long, broad belt of asteroids that are present on the boundaries of our solar
system. Having completed its flyby mission of Jupiter and Pluto on January 1,
2019, it successfully reached a new Kuiper belt object (KBO) 2014MU69 also
known as “Ultima Thule”.
Many scientists believe Ultima Thule
to be a dwarf planet present in the Kuiper belt but due to the lack of evidence
they are not able to prove so and hence it is still regarded as a Kuiper belt
object (KBO).
With the help of New Horizons,
scientists confirmed the existence of a hydrogen wall at the outer edges of the
solar system.
Till date, New Horizons is zooming
through the space reaching the deepest secrets of the universe that are yet to
be solved.
Tarun Binay Das
Class - IX A
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